Inability to open a .pdf file in a browser.

Question

For years, I have run Acrobat 6 standard.  My wife & I share the same desktop--she uses IE for her browser; I use Firefox.  Early this year we both began getting the following error message when trying to open a .pdf file from within our resepctive browsers, i.e., clicking a link to the .pdf file:
"The Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is running cannot be used to view .pdf files in a web browser. Please exit Adobe Acrobat/Reader and exit your web browser and try again."
To the best of my knowledge, neither Acrobat nor Reader was running at the time (unless somehow it's going in a background that I couldn't find).  I thought perhaps it was a glitch from Acrobat 6, so I have upgraded to Acrobat 9 standard a week ago and to Reader 9.1 3 weeks ago.
The problem still occurs, although not consistently, and the only way around it that I've found is to right-click the link on the webpage and save it to the desktop, then double-click the icon and it opens.  That's a bit of a pain.
Has any one encountered this before?  Do you have a solution?

Answer 1

Adobe STRONGLY recommends that you DO NOT have Acrobat and Reader on the SAME system. Based on my experience, the presence of both products causes all sorts of unpredictable behavior.
If you need Acrobat to create and edit PDFs, then you do not need Reader at all to open PDF files in any browser. You should delete one program or the other and do a repair on the remaining product afterward. I also recommend that after deleting one product, you restart your system and then repair the other product. If either Acrobat OR Reader is installed on your system, then the browsers should load that product to read the PDF file.
Good Luck.
Ken F.